


Don't Judge a Book...

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 07:34:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3601659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tuuri grows disheartened after one of the books isn’t all she’d hoped it would be, leading Sigrun to take drastic (though not unsuccessful) action to cheer everyone up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Outside the tank the weather had taken a turn for the worse. The most recent day of the expedition had seen thick black clouds marshalling on the western sky over Copenhagen like the dust from a marching army. Sigrun had taken one look at the thunderheads over breakfast and cheerfully predicted a storm that night, to the groans and grumblings of the rest of the crew. Soon enough she was proven right. It had barely been mid-afternoon when the first raindrops started falling around them, fat bullets of water that scrambled the view through the tank’s windows and sent everyone scurrying for cover inside. 

From then on there had been little to do but wait for the rain to stop. Mikkel had busied himself with stewing their dinner for the evening, and Lalli had predictably gone straight to sleep despite the din of the storm outside. The remaining three had passed the time with a series of card games that had devolved over the course of the day from high-stakes poker (with the contents of the pot being the last of Mikkel’s cookies), through blackjack and some odd Finnish game with a rude name that Tuuri had to teach the other two, before eventually ending up as a demented round of Norwegian snap. 

Emil was having a hard time getting to grips with this last one. The basic idea was you counted up from one as you put your cards down and when the number you said and the card you played coincided, that was snap. Then you had to put your hand down on the pile as quickly as possible, because the last person to do so picked up and the aim was to get rid of all your cards. Simple enough, but every time snap was called the winner of that round got to instate a new rule from the simple ‘count backwards’ to more annoying ‘silent sevens’ which meant you had to count in your head, not out lou- 

“ _SNAP!”_ bellowed Sigrun, slamming her hand down on the pile of cards on the floor between them hard enough to make the book piles around them shudder. The other two snatched their hands back in a mixture of surprise and an earnest desire not to have their fingers crushed. Emil looked down at the card Sigrun had played in angry confusion. 

“Nine? I thought we were on six!” he whined. 

“I thought it was my go…” murmured Tuuri, slightly shell-shocked. 

“I hate this game,” Emil muttered, tossing his remaining cards down onto the pile. 

Sigrun clapped both of them heartily on the shoulder. “Better luck next time, eh? And don’t knock it, Emil – Norwegain snap’s all about memory and reflexes, and you’ll need both out in the field. Keeps you in shape, believe it or not. You’ll get better with practice, trust me.” 

With that Sigrun shot him a conciliatory smile, got to her feet and ambled over to strike up a one-sided conversation with Mikkel. Tuuri retreated back to her bunk and picked up the book she had been leafing through since yesterday, some badly-weathered hardback that Lalli had absentmindedly snatched off a shelf the day before as he fled for his life from something that might once have been a wolf. Emil sat back against the wall and glanced over at the sleeping mage – right into a pair of intense blue eyes that were watching him with a very concerned expression. 

It took Emil a few seconds to reason out why Lalli was looking at him like that, and when he did he gave a small snort of laughter. The young Finn would just have watched the three of them sit in a circle and take it in turn to bash the hell out of the tank’s floor with their hands while shouting at each other. It must have looked like the strangest argument in history, or maybe like a very persistent grossling was tunnelling through the tank’s underbelly and having to be constantly swatted away. 

Emil grinned at Lalli and shook his head. “It’s fine, really. Just some dumb game,” he said. Lalli stared at him for a moment longer, then nodded almost imperceptibly closed his eyes again. Within seconds he was fast asleep again. Emil didn’t know how he did it. Outside the wind was shrieking and the rain on the roof sounded like a patient giant drumming its fingers in anticipation of its next meal. Off in the distance came the occasional grumble of thunder. Emil would have been hard-pressed to sleep through something half as loud as the storm swirling around them, but Lalli seemed to be gifted with an ability to drift off in almost any situation that wasn’t actively life-threatening. 

Across the crew compartment from Emil, Tuuri was trying to get her head round the contents of the book Lalli had salvaged from the ruin yesterday. It was in terrible condition – the hardback cover was ruined, with none of the words printed on it still legible. Inside half of the pages were missing and the remaining ones were rapidly being consumed by damp and mildew. She’d spent most of yesterday evening carefully drying it out over the stove once Mikkel had finished with it. The others had looked at her oddly for taking all that care over such a clapped-out book, but she was quietly convinced that if only half of the contents of this one could be salvaged it would revolutionise their understanding of the old world. Quite honestly, she was at a loss as to why Mikkel had largely ignored it when he had flicked through it yesterday. 

“Hey, Emil,” she called across the tank to where the young Swede was shaking his head in bemusement at her sleeping cousin. “You’ve been in the military for about a year, right? You must have seen a few tanks and other vehicles like that, yeah?” 

Emil looked over at her and scoffed. “Of course I did!” he said, his chest puffing up in self-importance. “I spent half the summer training to work as part of a mechanised platoon. Saw more tanks in a day than that old Danish base probably ever had on it in its lifetime.” 

Tuuri did her best not to roll her eyes. _Translated from Swedish: yeah, one or two_ , she thought to herself. “Have you ever seen a tank with legs?” she asked. 

Emil did a double-take. “Huh?” 

“Come and have a look at this,” she said excitedly, motioning for him to come over and wriggling to one side of her bunk to let Emil get a good look at the book propped open in front of her. He craned his head over her shoulder and immediately recoiled. 

“Gross! Tuuri, you’re resting that filthy old thing on your pillow!” he cried. “You’ll get mould in your hair tonight.” 

“Oh, it’s fine,” Tuuri chided. “I can wash it before bedtime. But look! Look at this thing!” She jabbed an excited finger at a full-page illustration on the book. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” 

Emil had to admit he hadn’t. The picture Tuuri was pointing to was a full-colour drawing of some enormous four-legged machine. It looked sort of like a horse, with four long legs and a bulky body, but its head was too small and stuck out from the front of the torso on a squat neck rather than curving gracefully up and over. The head itself was an odd shape too, oblong and angular and bristling with protrusions that looked like radio antennae and guns. The artist had drawn this impressive thing marching over a snowy landscape, one massive pawed foot effortlessly crushing some smaller piece of machinery as tiny figures ran for cover. Emil blinked and tried to work out the scale of this monster. Assuming the figures fleeing from it were to scale, the tank-thing must have been over twenty metres tall! 

“I haven’t… what _is_ that?” he asked. 

“Some old world tank, I think,” Tuuri said excitedly. “Look, they’ve got cutaway diagrams of it and everything!” She pointed to the page opposite the one Emil had been looking at. There, printed in washed-out colours and surrounded by half-illegible annotations, was a diagram of the monster with its slate-grey armour removed to show its inner workings. Its body was largely hollow, with two rows of serious-looking soldiers clad in odd white combat gear stood inside it. Clearly this thing had been intended for transporting troops. Elsewhere the artist had exposed the guts of the machine. Pistons and gears crowded its legs and a massive, complicated-looking engine took up the rear end of the torso. The head had been sliced open to reveal two pilots staring out through a viewing slit while manipulating various levers and pedals. Below the illustration was the remnant of a paragraph of text, presumably describing the armoured titan above. 

“That’s impossible,” muttered Emil, his words sounding hollow even to him. “I know the old world was advanced, but to make something like that… hell, even a giant couldn’t stand up to that thing!” 

Tuuri grinned at him, excitement dancing in her eyes. “I know! And I’ve never heard of anything like this in history lessons! I think we’re onto something big with this, Emil, I really do. If the old world could build weapons like this they must have been way more advanced than we thought they were! Even Iceland can’t build things this powerful!” 

Emil leaned forward and squinted at the words crowding the diagram. At least he could read Danish, if not understand it spoken. He zeroed in on one word that he didn’t recognise. “Atat? AT-AT? Is that Danish? What does it mean?” 

“I think it’s this thing’s name,” Tuuri replied. “It might not have actually been built in Denmark, this is just a Danish book. I’ve heard that there were some countries in the old world that were as big as continents and had armies the size of the population of the known world. Maybe one of them built these?” 

“To fight _what_?” Emil shuddered. 

“I don’t know,” Tuuri murmured. Now that _was_ a frightening thought. “But this book…” she continued, flipping the pages carefully. High-tech marvels flitted past their eyes: strange tanks, cities floating through a rich orange sky and rising on pillars from stormy seas, sleek flying machines with X-shaped wings, guns that shot lightning, men made of metal and more soldiers in that strange white armour. “It’s full of these things! Tech I’ve never heard of, flying machines that don’t have gasbags or proper wings, cities that I’ve never seen on old world maps! Emil, about the old world… they’ve got everything wrong! Back home, all those skalds and scholars, they don’t have a clue about _any_ of this.” 

For the next half hour they leafed through the rotting tome, cooing and gasping over its contents. Tuuri struggled to understand why no history book she had read mentioned any of these marvels. Did people simply not know? That seemed unlikely. But why hide them? Were these technologies forbidden somehow? Had the gods abandoned the old world because of these? Something wasn’t right, she thought – she was missing something vital. Furrowing her brow in furious concentration she analysed every last scrap of information surrounding the lavish diagrams for some clue as to where these lost miracles had gone. 

Emil meanwhile simply had krona signs spinning in his eyes. If this tech existed, it could be rediscovered, patented, packaged, sold… elaborate ideas of ‘Vasterstrom Industries’ started to cartwheel through his brain. He rubbed his hands in glee. Uncle Torbjorn had promised him riches and the old man sure hadn’t been lying! If nothing else, he could expect a hefty finder’s fee. _We can buy back our old house_ , he thought to himself with delight, _get my cousins some proper tutors so they don’t have to face the humiliation of school like I did…_

Eventually Mikkel left Sigrun tending to the stew and came over to see what all the excitement was about. 

_Oh, no…_ he thought when he caught a glimpse of the book they were poring over. He knew he should have explained what it was to Tuuri beforehand. If it had been anyone else he would have happily let them come to the awkward realisation themselves. Emil, for example, who was sat next to Tuuri and doing his best impression of King Midas. But Tuuri just looked so excited by it all and godsdamnit, he wasn’t made of stone. 

“Hey! Mikkel!” Tuuri called out as he approached. “Why on earth did you put this book away!? It’s incredible! Just look at this one!” she carried on, pointing at yet another lavish illustration. Mikkel glanced down at a dagger-shaped ship suspended on a background of stars and groaned inside. He still remembered those things from when he was a kid and his parents had taken him to see the National Archive’s ‘Films of the Old World’ weekend in the one cinema on Bornholm. He’d spent the next twelve months playing Rebels and Stormtroopers with his friends back on the family farm and by all accounts had been able to do a worryingly good impression of Darth Vader for an eight year old boy. 

Reaching down, he gently took the old book from Tuuri and closed it. If you held the front cover in _just_ the right way, you could make out the imprint of the title where it had been embossed. 

_The Art of Star Wars – Concept Art and Diagrams: Collector’s Edition  
_

A career as a medic had left him well-equipped him for breaking upsetting news to people. He put on his best I’m-sorry-for-your-loss face and readied his sombre voice. Tuuri looked up at him in confusion. 

“Tuuri, there’s something I need to explain to you…” he began.


	2. Chapter 2

Two hours later and the storm had gotten worse. The rain had been loud before but now it was like a jackhammer on the tank’s roof. The wind whooped and screamed like a madman’s laughter and the time between thunderclaps was getting shorter. Occasionally lightning would burst overhead and illuminate the inside of the tank with its harsh electric-white light, leaching the colour out of everything and making the five of them look like ghouls. 

Inside, the mood had taken a turn for the worse. Tuuri and Emil lay on their respective bunks, subdued and miserable that their treasure trove of lost technology had turned out to be pictures from some piece of old world make-believe. Lalli, responding to the whims of his seriously defective body clock, had finally woken up to find his cousin and friend suddenly despondent for reasons neither seemed to want to talk about (not that he and Emil could have discussed it anyway). Mikkel had a sneaking suspicion Lalli blamed him and Sigrun for whatever had happened, but had no way to confirm that without Tuuri’s help – and he felt like he should leave the young skald be for the time being. 

In short, everyone was tired, short-tempered and in desperate need of some cheering up. It was, Sigrun decided, time for her Secret Weapon. 

Standing up from the pile of books she had been using as a makeshift stool, she marched over to where their electric stove had been stowed away in a corner and started to drag it over to the middle of the crew compartment. She had to kick a few books out of the way to do so and Mikkel scrabbled to pick up the rest before she damaged half their stash. “Sigrun, what _are_ you doing?” he asked as a collection of Shakespeare skittered across the floor and disappeared under Tuuri’s bunk. The other three watched her with confused – and slightly wary – expressions. 

SIgrun fixed Mikkel with a look that said _do not interfere with my work_ and resumed clearing a path. She set the stove down, making sure it was positioned so that they could all reasonably reach it, flicked it on and went back to her kit bag which had gotten lodged under the desk. Still not saying a word she started rooting through it, tossing spare clothes, emergency rations and spare ammo to one side. 

Lalli leaned over and whispered to Tuuri in a low voice. “Has our boss gone mad?” he asked, then paused. “Well, madder?” he appended. 

“Maybe…” Tuuri replied. 

Sigrun heard her crew muttering behind her but paid them no attention. She’d been on expeditions where they’d lost soldiers to frostbite and giants, where they’d gotten stuck in city ruins for a week and survived off old world tins and water from stagnant ponds. She’d sat around campfires late at night in the cleansed areas and swapped tall tales with old comrades, poured libations for lost friends and shoved mead bottles into the hands of new ones. And from all this she had learned that there was one thing, one Secret Weapon, that cheered people up like nothing else on Earth. Nowadays she never went outside the safe zones without them, even if a single pack cost two week’s salary. 

Ah! There they were, hidden beneath her dog-eared copy of _Troll Hunting_. Good book, that – she’d have to make everyone else read it at some point. But that was for some other time. She grabbed the thing beneath it, a large heat-sealed plastic bag with pink lettering up one side. The finest Swedish packaging preserving the greatest gift the old world had left the new. 

“Sigrun, what have you got there…?”asked Mikkel from behind her, with a note of hope in his voice. 

She span around, holding her prize aloft like a conquering hero. “ _Who wants marshmallows?”_ she bellowed, grinning from ear to ear. 

There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by a chorus of “Me! Me!” in three different languages. _And the crowd goes wild,_ she thought to herself. _Sigrun Eide scores again!_

“Now,” she said, grabbing a set of forks from their cutlery pile and skewering a marshmallow on each one before passing them around, “who knows any good stories?” 

It was like someone had flicked a switch in their collective heads. Within minutes the disappointment of the useless book and the trepidation of the storm had been forgotten. They sat around an electric stove and stuffed their faces with toasted sugar. There was laughter at Tuuri’s story of the time Lalli tried riding a bike outside of the Keuruu walls and came back with three trolls chasing him. They shivered when Sigrun brought out her ghost tales of corpse-lights over the fjords and the old numbers stations calling through the black noise. And for one precious moment, in amongst the storm and the night, marooned on the fringes of the world, they felt less like a squad on a mission and more like a group of old friends on some mad adventure. 

It was, they would all agree later, a great shame Sigrun had not locked up the marshmallows when they had finished. They never got angry at Lalli for stealing them, though: it was quietly decided that anyone who could steal a valuable foil package from a kitbag being used as a pillow by a woman armed to the teeth was someone worth keeping around.

**Author's Note:**

> When I was growing up I loved those Star Wars cutaway books, and when someone on the fan forum wondered what would happen if our crew got their hands on one, the idea pretty much wrote itself.


End file.
